Epileptic man left to drown in 3 ft of water while firefighters stood by watching

[Octoman]

I am so flabbergasted by this story I was sure it was a spoof when I heard it on the radio. I'll post extracts from the Guardian story first since a lot of posters seem to naturally trust their reporting. The Telegraph also has a good write up with extra details. Links to the full articles at the end.

In short, a man had an epileptic fit feeding ducks and fell into a 3 ft deep lake. Witnesses raised the alarm (why they didn't wade in to help god only knows). Fire fighters arrived shortly afterwards and proceeded to spend 28 minutes discussing what to do because they are not allowed into water deeper than ankle depth due to health and safety. From the Guardian :

Witnesses raised the alarm, but the hearing was told on Tuesday that members of a fire crew refused to get to him because the water was more than ankle deep. Instead, they waited for a specialist water rescue team and Burgess was only taken out of the lake 28 minutes after the alarm was raised.

Instead of wading in to help they contacted the control room for advice. The control room alerted the coastguard as per standard procedure and sent a specialist water trained crew

Deborah Coles, the control room manager at Hampshire Fire and Rescue, told the inquest that she took the call from Hughes at 12.17pm and, within a minute, had sent a fire appliance, a water rescue trained crew and a water support unit.

"Police, ambulance and coastguard were also sent as standard for a water rescue," she added. "The specialist teams are there to deal with water which is over half a boot in depth. At 12.20pm, the fire crew confirmed attendance and at 12.25 they told us a male was floating face down."

Another fire crew did eventually arrive but still did nothign to help

She said that another fire crew arrived and started walking around the lake, putting in a pole and measuring the depth but, by this time, Burgess had drifted from one side of the lake to the other

From the telegraph

“The officers were trained to go into ankle deep water, which is level one, so we waited for level two officers, who can go into chest high. One of the police officers told me he would like to go in the water and I advised him in the strongest terms not to.” Mr Nicholls’s superior, Tim Spencer-Peet, said he had been happy with the watch manager’s decision-making.

It seems that because the man was floating around face down they just assumed he was already dead and treated it as a body retrieval exercise. But if he had only been there for 5 to 10 mintues there was a chance he was still alive. I would have thought any reasonable person would just get straight in and try and help.

I despair of the jobsworth culture sometimes.


Picture of the lake when the specialist water crew finally wade in to retrieve the body (from The Mail) :


Links to articles.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/fe...?newsfeed=true

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...face-down.html